BRUNO
(ca. 1030–1101). Founder of the Carthusian order. Originally from Cologne, Bruno
served as canon, schoolmaster, and eventually chancellor at the cathedral of Reims; he
may even have been offered the archiepiscopal office ca. 1081. Fleeing the city for a life
in the “desert,” he settled as a hermit at Sèche-Fontaine, attached to the monastery of
Molesme; but he did not find the isolation he sought there and finally established a
hermitage on a nearly inaccessible massif at La Grande Chartreuse, in the Alps, in 1084.
Bruno believed that hermits needed a rule, decrying those who practiced what he
considered an anarchical life, and that isolation and autonomy were necessary to keep
away the influence of the secular world. After a few years, Pope Urban II summoned
Bruno from La Grande Chartreuse to the papal curia; the pope then tried to name him
bishop of Reggio. Instead, Bruno retired to a hermitage in Calabria, where he died in
1101.
Constance B.Bouchard
[See also: CARTHUSIAN ORDER; MONASTICISM]
Wigo. Chronique des premiers chartreux, ed. André Wilmart. Revue Mabillon 16(1926):77–142.
Bligny, Bernard, ed. Recueil des plus anciens actes de la Grande-Chartreuse (1086–1196).
Grenoble: The Author, 1958.
——. Saint Bruno: le premier chartreux. Rennes: Ouest-France, 1984.
——, and Gerald Chaix, eds. La naissance des Chartreuses: Actes du Vle Colloque International
d’Histoire et de Spiritualité Cartusiennes. Grenoble: n.p., 1984.
BUEIL
. The lords of Bueil in Touraine played an important role as military commanders in late-
medieval France. Jean III (1346–91) commanded important contingents of royal troops
over a twenty-year period beginning in 1368 and served as a royal seneschal in
Languedoc between 1374 and 1382. His brother, Pierre, was bailiff of Touraine for
nineteen years and was a partisan of Louis I of Anjou and then Louis of Orléans in the
rivalries among royal princes. Jean IV, also a supporter of Orléans, rose to the position of
master of crossbowmen in the 1390s but met his death at Agincourt in 1415. His brother
Hardouin, bishop of Angers, became guardian of his young son. Jean V (ca. 1406–1477)
fought in the Battle of Verneuil (1424), served under La Hire and Jeanne d’Arc, and
participated in most of the remaining campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War. Although he
joined the princely rebellion of 1440 (the Praguerie), he became reconciled with Charles
VII, who named him admiral of France in 1450. In 1461, however, the new king, Louis
XI, relieved him of this office when he ousted most of his father’s leading officers.
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